The work and musings of Quilliam Collister watercolour artist and traveller

A Long Walk

We had decided on a quieter day yesterday, and did not get away until around 11am, taking a taxi to the southern shore of Ho Tay lake in the north of the city. The lake is quite extensive and we started to walk around the eastern side, stopping for lunch at a posh restaurant with tables looking out across the lake at the city beyond. I made a small sketch of the skylines and almost immediately had the men from the next table leaning closely over my shoulder. No pressure!

We could not really communicate with them but told them where we are from and found out that one or more of them were from the south of Vietnam.
We kept walking through what was obviously a wealthy suburb with nice multi storey houses near the lake, but there is also a lot of rubbish and some quite ratty buildings. The average income here is around $2000 US and there are obviously many people scratching to make a living any way they can. But there are also new Bentleys, Maseratis etc on the road which make no sense the way the traffic is here.

Heading back we found the temple where I took the photo above. We also passed another temple which dates from the 6th century and the large tree is said to have been grown from a cutting of the tree under which Buddha found enlightenment.

Having eaten very cheaply much of the time (some meals from street vendors costing less then $3 nz each) our dinner at a very flash restaurant cost 1.2 million dong (about $73 nz).